Fun experiment to determine your soil texture

November 13, 2011

Soil Texture Experiment

Getting to know your soil is half way to determining how well your plants will grow.

Your soil contains nutrients and minerals that allow plants to thrive so if you can identify your soil type – whether it’s clay, sand, peaty or loam, you can work with the soil you have rather than constantly fighting against it.

How to find out what your soil texture is

A fun experiment you can carry out at home (and a great one for the children to help with too) is to place about a cup full of your soil into a straight sided, clean jar, removing any larger pebbles or stones first.

Add a tablespoon of laundry detergent and a tablespoon of salt to the soil then fill the jar with water to the top before screwing on a lid tightly.

Shake the jar for five minutes or so (you may need help!)

Leave the jar undisturbed where you can see it. After a couple of days the soil particles will settle into layers.

Reading the Results

As the sand particles are the heaviest they will sink to the bottom first, followed by silt then clay. The thickness of each layer will help to determine how much of each is contained in your soil.

So as you can see from the result of our Greenside Up soil above, a small layer of sand has settled at the bottom, then silt, with clay at the top, at roughly 20% sand, 30% silt and 50% clay.

The Greenside up soil is therefore considered a heavy clay soil.

You can usually identify your soil type just by looking at it and feeling it, without the need for an experiment (this was just for a bit of fun) – sandy soil is lighter in colour than clay for instance.

So how do I determine my soil without the experiment?

Grab a handful of dry soil and add a few drops of water, mixing well until it become pliable. Try rolling the soil into a ball.

If it feels gritty, if it crumbles when you try to roll it into a ball then your soil is sandy.

Course sand feels like granulated sugar when rubbed between fingers.Medium sand feels like table salt when rubbed.Fine sand is harder to detect unless you hold your fingers near your ears as you rub it.

Sandy soils are easy to dig but water and nutrients flow through them easily, meaning they dry out quickly and will have to be replenished regularly. Sandy soils warm quickly and retain their heat (just think of a warm beach) which some plants especially like, particularly carrots and their roots will swell.

If, when you try to roll the soil into a ball in your hand it holds together well, or if it feels much finer than sand, then your soil texture will be silt or clay. If it feels like plasticine then its fine clay whereas silt particles will leave it feeling like icing sugar. If you can roll the soil into a sausage and it forms a ring, its clay. If it forms a sausage but breaks up as you try to make a ring and feels silky, its silty loam.

Clay soils are described as heavy and can be very sticky to dig. If you try digging when clay soil is wet you can damage the structure of it. Clay soils are slow to warm up but retain water better in the hotter months and therefore keep their valuable nutrients for longer. Because their particles are so tiny they tend to pack together tightly which creates poor drainage and aeration and can contribute towards roots rotting.

Sorry to be a pain but i think there’s one error where you write about silt and clay soils and you refer to the ‘sausage breaking up’ as being clay but i think you mean silt. Great experiment though. We’ll try this one at home. Thanks very much Dee x

[…] First on the agenda was some serious hand weeding. The bed was chock-a-block with creeping buttercup, dandelions and docks – all indicators that we were working in a clay soil – something we’d already established during the four-week introductory course. […]

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Who is Behind Greenside Up

Hi, my name is Dee Sewell, social and therapeutic horticulturalist, owner/manager of Greenside Up, community and vegetable garden tutor and author of this blog.
I began blogging back in 2009 when I started my Carlow/Kilkenny garden business and as a result the blog is now full of tips, tales, talk and tasty treats about Ireland, gardening, recipes, the environment, family life and community.
If you want to find more about how we came to live in Ireland and what we do, take a look in the About page or Contact me about how I can help you grow your own food.

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This is a very good and easy to understand guide for both the beginner and for those needing a refresher course to get started

Tullow Family Resource Centre Gardener

Dee has given me lots of knowledge and skills to get out and get my garden sorted. Maybe I can be nearly as good as my Dad was. He grew everything have lots of memories of harvesting fruit and veg as a child. Now it’s time for me to create similar memories for my own kids. Thanks for the know how and somewhat shaky confidence. Really looking forward to lots more gardening and harvesting. Thanks again – Verena Butler, Hugginstown

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Brian Paterson, Co Owner, The Secret Garden Centre

I was extremely happy with the community garden project delivered by Greenside Up at Carrick-on-Suir Library. Dee Sewell delivered everything she promised in a friendly and professional manner and with a very short lead time. Dee worked well with the TY boys from CBS Carrick-on-Suir and brought them, step by step, through the entire process of measuring, digging, planting, mulching and constructing raised beds. We all benefitted enormously from the gardening project learning about the advantages…